TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Peplum

Of Petronius’ most famous set piece, Trimalchio’s feast, only a single late episode is kept, a suitor’s sexual embarrassment before his mistress, and even there the classes are upended: instead of a patrician mistress and a slave, Blutch serves up a would-be- nobleman and a lowly actress. The very era is shifted from the fiendish decadence of Nero’s Rome to the Second Triumvirate, allowing Blutch to open with his take on a scene that the peplum genre, if not drama itself, has fetishized: the assassination of Julius Caeser. Continuing his freewheeling collage, Blutch cribbed the central conceit of a young man in love with a mysteriously frozen woman from Roland Petit’s 1953 ballet The Lady in the Ice . He gave his own frozen woman the head of the Lady of Auxerre , a Cretan sculpture in the Louvre, and an Egyptian body, and lends the hero’s other paramour, an androgynous youth, the face of the Boy with Thorn , a Hellenistic bronze in Rome’s Palazzo dei Conservatori. “When I see something I can use,” he says, “I take it. Wonderful things make you want to steal them.” Blutch would not read other Romans until later, but striking impressions of light and rock from a trip to Sicily snuck into the book. Blutch has explored, in art and interviews, his own love-hate relationship with movies and their persistent influence on comics. He has deplored a tendency toward storyboarding in comics that to his mind restrains their reach, suggesting that comics are capable of “larger, richer” narration—“more elliptical, mysterious, and poetic.” Over the years, he has variously attributed Peplum ’s cinematic inspirations to Pier Paolo Pasoini, whom he found close in spirit to Petronius ( Accatone , The Hawks and the Sparrows , especially Medea ); Orson Welles, whose low- 177